Domo Arigato, Mr. Bay

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is better, longer robot junk.

THESE BEDBUGS ARE GETTING OUT OF HAND: One of Michael Bay’s new friends. - IMAGE: Paramount Pictures

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Watching Transformers movies, you
can imagine a preadolescent, mulleted Michael Bay lording over other
kids’ imaginations, demanding his classmates play the way he wants them
to. But he has the coolest toys, so everybody obliges him, in the hope
they’ll get their hands on one of his cutting-edge gadgets.

And what cool toys
they are. Say what you will about Bay, the dude dazzles like a drunken
frat guy with a bucket of fireworks. At his worst—Pearl Harbor, The Island—he’s an egotist with a misplaced sense of self-importance. At his best—The Rock and the first Bad Boys—he
takes familiar tropes like buddy cops and amps them through the
stratosphere with an unabashed disregard for subtlety or tastefulness.
He transforms familiarity into over-the-top spectacle. Which is why Bay
seems the perfect match for Hasbro. Who better to helm a toy story about
gigantic robots that change into instruments of destruction and smash
into each other? Yet the first two Transformers films are
complete messes: The first blew a flat in its indecipherable chaos and
dumb-fuck story line, while the other took everything that was wrong
with the original and made it worse. Critics scoffed and fanboys turned
up their noses (while opening their wallets).

Apparently that
little boy from the schoolyard actually listened to the critical and
audience drubbing that followed the series’ second installment. With Transformers: Dark of the Moon,
he has delivered what we want: a dumb-as-rocks, rock-’em-sock-’em
popcorn flick without pretension. Sure, there’s a plot—some shit about
how an Autobots ship crash-landed on the moon right around the time Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their giant leap. But that MacGuffin is
so far in the background it becomes an afterthought.

For
no other reasons than familiarity and bankability, Shia LeBeouf is back
as Sam Witwicky, a friend of the heroic Autobots, who work black ops for
the U.S. government while preventing the evil Decepticons from
destroying humanity. As the robot races square off around the globe (in
such exotic locales as Angkor Wat and “Middle Eastern Illegal Nuclear
Site”), Sam races to protect his new love interest (Victoria’s Secret
model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, introduced by a 3-D ass shot that makes
Megan Fox’s debut in the original look like a Gloria Steinem book
jacket) from falling debris.

And that’s about it.
Robots fight. Stars like John Turturro, John Malkovich and Frances
McDormand chomp scenery. Robots fight some more. When Bay brings out the
big guns—as he does in a 40-minute climactic battle across Chicago
featuring toppling skyscrapers and, surprisingly, some of the most
stunning real-life stunt work captured on film in ages—it’s a blast,
albeit a redundant one. The CGI is more refined, and comprehensible too.
In the previous films, the complex details of the robots served as a
cacophonous distraction of blurred moving parts; here you can actually
decipher what’s going on in a battle.

Alas, like most kids,
Bay doesn’t know when to close the toy box. At nearly 160 minutes, the
film is as butt-numbing as it is eye-popping, and no amount of chaotic
action can mask the fact that Dark of the Moon is at least an
hour too long. Bay may have ceded to his critics and made a more
crowd-pleasing flick, but he can’t hide the rust on his gears. Perhaps
it’s time to put these toys in the attic and move on to exploiting a
different cherished childhood plaything.